December 15, 2010

The answer to your question, Maura, about my favorite time-travel moment of 2010, is "Yamaha," which I am tempted to just add outright to Purple Rain's tracklist, maybe right between "When Doves Cry" and "I Would Die 4 U."

A tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

Ben pointed me at this one. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to override my defaults for screen timeouts, and now I can!

Everyone needs Caffeine. And they really do, because every time I see someone's screen sleep during a presentation, I think, "everyone needs Caffeine".

December 03, 2010

Evi Quaid called from a pay phone in Vancouver to say that she and her husband, Randy, the actor, had tried to drive to Siberia, but they “couldn’t figure out how to get there.” She said, “We’re running for our lives.” She wanted me to meet them the next day in Vancouver’s Chinatown—which couldn’t be arranged any other way, as the Quaids don’t use cell phones anymore, because, Evi said, “they’re tracking us.”

I like Randy Quaid! My favorite Randy Quaid might still be the short-lived television show "Davis Rules", from 1991-2. It had an all-star cast over the course of its two-season run: Randy Quaid, Jonathan Winters, Patricia Clarkson (also in the best film of 2010), Bonnie Hunt, Giovanni Ribisi, & others. I liked it so much that I taped every episode and re-watched them many times.